


Saviors

by Capella



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:39:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capella/pseuds/Capella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Savior, mystic, burdened daughter of burdened parents. Yeesha has always been her father's child, but in many ways, she is heir to her mother most of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saviors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laughingpineapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/gifts).



> For laughingpineapple, my friend and fellow Uru/End of Ages conspirator. I hope I captured Yeesha's brilliant, fractured mind and quest.

She has not been back to the Cleft for many months. She only visits to record messages for those who will come. She nearly misses the note, and when she reads it, she wonders how long it has been there. 

(While he methodically dates his journal entries, he never dates his notes. She remembers many times in her youth where his oversight in doing so had caused problems – typically something minor, like spoiled food or a dead plant. It was something she and her mother could always roll their eyes and sigh together about.)

To see her father’s handwriting on a note about her mother’s dreams is surprising. He has always been careful to never entirely dismiss them, though it has always been clear that he has discomfort with the idea. She knows he must have learned to be tolerant of it from living with her mother for so long. From their first meeting, Katran’s gift for vision and the impossible had challenged Atrus’ belief that all could be explained via rationality and logic. 

As she grew older, her gift had seemed to fade - or, perhaps, she merely spoke of it less at home, to settle the unease her husband feels whenever the mystical is brought up. But she Wrote Serenia, taught her daughter to interpret Dream and dreams, and she brought her to an impossible torus created from vision. Katran always wanted her daughter to know both sides of her heritage; the mystic and the practical.

She vows to discuss the dream with her mother the next time she goes home, but it is several months, and she forgets. Her mother looks at her with shadows in her eyes, knowing what will soon befall her daughter’s plans, but Yeesha does not see. 

\---

As a girl, Yeesha had always asked her mother to tell her what she Saw. Her father had always assumed that Yeesha was simply repeating Anna’s question to her mother, in the same way that she asked it of her father. But her mother, ever perceptive, always knew which sense of see her daughter meant at the time, and would indulge her daughter by describing visions wrapped in poetic (and often obscure) metaphors.

It was Katran who first gave Yeesha the metaphor of the dormant D’ni city as a tree, even though she later found that imagery repeated elsewhere. Now, whenever she speaks of it, she remembers her mother. And she wonders – would her mother approve of what she is doing, now?

\---

Her mother was once a savior. She led her people from a crumbling world ruled by tyranny to a new Age where they could rebuild in freedom.

Her father was once a savior. He found the D’ni survivors and he created a new Age for them to create a new society.

She walks the path of one called by destiny for a great task. She bears the burden of many other people’s lives on her back. She saw firsthand the toll that it took on them. For her father, it was crushing, and the reason why he stayed in Tomahna with his family rather than packing up and moving them to Releeshahn. For similar reasons, her mother had spent years being reluctant to stay on Tay for very long.

She is a savior, like her parents before her. But she is not Writing a new Age. She wonders if that makes her path better, or worse.

\---

Being a savior means having the expectations of many people, and they will project them on you when you walk among them. She tries to only appear to the Called very rarely, because the look in their eyes when they see her frightens her.

She wonders if it is the same look that the survivors gave Atrus when he returned them to D’ni, and when they Linked to Releeshahn for the first time. If it is the type of look that Katran received when she was imprisoned on Riven, when the Moiety looked at her with a goddess’ reverence, and the villagers with the fear that the new savior would prove to be as bad as the old. 

That thought reminds her that there is another option, and it is one that concerns her deeply. She knows that there were others who saw themselves as saviors, as gods. Kadish, who claimed that he was the Grower, who built an Age dedicated to displaying his false mastery over time so that the people would give him adulations that were never meant for one like him to hold. A’Gaeris, who broke from the tenants of the Writers and decided that even if they were not gods in truth, that they could claim the mantle regardless and use it to rule. Gehn, whose versions of the teachings followed in that flawed and corrupted path, who needed to feel as though his loss and his survival made sense, and sought the worship of others as a balm for his trauma. They all believed themselves saviors of a sort, too, and they receieved the same types of glances.

Yeesha is not entirely sure how her Called see her. In her best days, she believes that they understand their mission and that they appreciate the rare physical glimpses of their guide. In her worst, she worries that she has formed them into a cult that the most proud among the tyrannical D’ni would have been envious to oversee. Regardless of how their looks are meant, she does not want to see them, so she guides from afar.

\---  
She knows that her father has always tried his very best to understand his Desert Bird, and his support for her has been ceaseless. He did not understand when she left Tomahna for the Cleft, the Cleft for D’ni, D’ni for parts even farther out. His burden was always clearly laid out for him, even if it took decades for him to accept it fully and to act on it. Hers has been more nebulous. As a teen, she felt a calling and she knew that she must take it up, even though its exact nature remained unclear. She knows that her father worries that she is setting herself up for a painful and potentially futile path, but he has never tried to stop her. Like Anna, he allows his child to do what she will, and trusts that his teachings will carry her home.

With parents like hers, with what they have given her, how can they not?


End file.
